MensHealth.com Chronicles How Porn Has Evolved Since ’73

CYBERSPACE—With 2017 coming to a close, Men’s Health magazine, which often covers the porn beat, this week offered a review not of the year in porn—but of the genre’s entire history. Through interviews with longtime industry luminaries including Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley, the magazine tracked nine significant developments in the evolution of porn since its inception as a form of mass entertainment in the early 1970s. The business now known as the adult video industry began in earnest in 1973 when the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in Miller v. California. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that “obscenity” could be defined by contemporary “community standards,” rather than simply by the actions depicted in a particular work. In the four-plus decades since, Men’s Health wrote, the industry has evolved from what Hartley described as "a small, convivial country club,” with only a few active performers regularly shooting films, to a sprawling industry with hundreds of porn “stars” working at any given time. Here are some of the other major changes in the development of porn both as a business and entertainment medium, identified in the Men’s Health article: • Porn performers are younger today than when the industry was new. According to adult industry >publicist Lainie Speiser, quoted in the article, many of her current clients are as young as 18 years old, the minimum age to work as a performer in the business. (And most agent in the biz would corroborate this, no doubt.) But in the early days of the industry, “The average age I would say of a porn star back then was, like, 25,” Speiser said. “Most of these women had already lived before they got into the porn industry, meaning that a lot of them started out as dancers in strip clubs and stuff like that. So they already had some experience behind them.” • Many more women watch, and produce, porn today than in the early years of the business. According to Annie Sprinkle, several pioneering women in the 1980s began creating erotic entertainment specifically aimed at a female audience. “Thanks to [filmmaker Candida Royalle] and a few other women trying to make pornography and erotica, that really opened the door for women to actually start watching,” Sprinkle told the magazine.  In 2016, according to stats from the free porn mega-site Pornhub, an average of 16.6 million women viewed at least one pornographic video on the site every single day. • Performers can now get “stuck” in niche genres. With the explosion of internet porn, videos depicting even the most outré, highly specific sexual preferences are easily available—and performers may often find themselves essentially typecast in certain speciality areas. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, most sex scenes in porn films depicted essentially the same acts over and over again, according to Hartley. ”All the sex was pretty vanilla: oral both ways, P-in-V intercourse, external ejaculation," she described to Men’s Health—a far cry from today’s vast menu of offerings.  But the drawback is that in today’s industry, it’s all too asy for performer to become known for performing a narrowly defined, specific type of sex act—and find it difficult to find work doing anything else. “We didn’t have niches back then, where you got stuck in one little corner and that’s all you could do,” said “golden age” porn star Jeanne Silver in the article. “I was in mainstream movies. I’m sure if it was nowadays, I would be stuck in a niche.” Above, right, Nina Hartley at AEE; photo by Dave Yeager; left, Annie Sprinkle at the Golden Age of Adult Cinema Series; photo by Chris King